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In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Union Army had been demobilized to approximately 25,000 troops (Skowronek, 1982), and the militias mobilized by the Northern states during the war had largely disbanded (Cooper, 1997, p. 23). Historically, U.S. armed force was rooted in provincial republican tradition – the locally based militia system – that depended on the amateur citizen-soldier. Within this tradition, strong citizen's militias were considered the essential bulwark against the dangers of an independent, sovereign and centralized state (Skowronek, 1982). Early militias were organized through regionally based voluntary social clubs differentiated along ethnic and status lines, fused with state and local political machines through patronage networks, and were minimally subsidized by the federal government (Reinders, 1977; Skowronek, 1982; Montgomery, 1993). Militias had historically consisted of two basic types. Common militias were those that were mobilized and operated under the auspices of a government authority, at the municipal or state-level; and Independent militias were organized, financed, and operated by private individuals.

During the last several decades of the 19th century, armed force in America went through a major transformation. Part of that institutional change revolved around the development of the militia system into a truly national guard, a permanent state-supported institution (Cooper, 1997, p. 31). But that national development did not follow a smooth trajectory that eliminated independents and added regular common militia units under nationally integrated state command structures.

Between 1877 and the end of the 1880s, independent militias grew in some cities and were reconstituted in others. This chapter in armed force history is largely connected to the economic, industrial, and class reconfiguration that the nation was undergoing. While class conflict was growing more intense and widespread, the institutional ability to police labor uprisings as large-scale regional or national phenomena had not changed much from the antebellum period. Large economic organizations – employing thousands of men, extending across vast areas – made it increasingly difficult to put down strikes and other contentious collective actions.

The first national labor uprising in summer 1877 made the gap between working-class formation and policing institutions clear to elites for the first time. The uprising began as a railroad strike at the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) depot in Martinsburgh, West Virginia in the context of repeated wage cuts and work speed-ups. The strike spread quickly along the B&O and other rail lines igniting actions in scores of cities from Baltimore to San Francisco. Mass actions overflowed the rails as the rail strikes served as a symbolic flashpoint to mobilize miners, some factory workers, cigar workers, masses of unemployed, and others sympathetic to the struggle and resentful of rails, banks, and the oligarchical character of the newly emerging political economy (Stowell, 1999; Isaac, 2002).

The big lesson for elites – businessmen, politicians, military leaders – was that the existing local militia apparatus was inadequate in size and ill-prepared to deal with such mass collective actions. In the aftermath of the 1877 uprising, the press was peppered with editorials regarding the unreliable character of the volunteer forces (Isaac, 2002). Federal troops eventually crushed the uprising in most major urban centers, but it had taken weeks to do so, given limited troop strength, preparation, the widespread character of the uprising, and transportation difficulties. Some business leaders (Thomas Scott, Pennsylvania rails; Marshall Field, Chicago retail; Amasa Stone, Cleveland manufacturing and rails) unsuccessfully agitated for Congress to provide appropriations for expanding the army and creating permanent garrison outposts at critical locations across the urban, industrial heartland (Isaac, 2002).

Under the very realistic belief that the 1877 uprising was no fluke but would likely happen again, given an inadequate/unreliable local militia and an army insufficient in scale to respond to all areas quickly, some “leading citizens” took matters into their own hands and self-organized. Local elite counter-organization followed two major paths. In some urban areas (e.g., Chicago) existing independent militias were recomposed with elites eliminating potentially unreliable ethnic (especially German or Irish) and working-class types from their ranks. Industrial elites and their wealthy associates followed a different approach in other cities (e.g., Cleveland) and formed their own independent militia anew.4

The key to this self-formation of independent elite militia armed force was its flexibility in solving a variety of problems of order that other institutions and the state were unable or unwilling to confront. As Isaac (2002, p. 393)put it: “Proper military training would ensure skill and readiness, clearly something that had been missing from traditional militia response in summer 1877. Self-organization rooted in local friendship, family, neighborhood, and business networks and autonomy from state-affiliated militia would ensure independence from unreliable (classes) and ill-trained militias, as well as from ‘corrupt’ unreliable municipal politicians and police. Local (neighborhood-based) militia could be relied upon to protect not only private industrial properties of members and their friends, but also neighborhood and homes….”

Industrial elites of the Gilded Age felt besieged by evil in a variety of forms – labor movement and unions, immigrant working-class hordes, demagogues and riotous urban mobs, corrupt municipal politics that mobilized the votes of masses of working-class and immigrant voters, the corrosion of morality, feminization of society, and concerns over weakening manliness – all of which had a common denominator: the threat “to the rightful, natural position of power and authority that belonged to elite Victorian men” (Isaac, 2002, p. 392). The first “corporate warriors” of modern industrial America undertook to arm themselves and organize collectively in the name of public order and welfare. That they did so was a sign of structural state weakness, one that they helped shore-up with their own private armies.

The National Guard eventually absorbed these independent militias, or they withered and died off (Cooper, 1997). As the Guard became a more established institution in the early 20th century, the U.S. military forces went through a re-organization that made them more professional, centralized, and institutionally stable (Skowronek, 1982). In this process, the state acquired a contentious legitimacy over the use of force that was centrally controlled. The standard view was that this armed division of the state existed to defend the nation against external threats, but the development of the National Guard was fueled, in part, by class-based threats within the domestic arena (e.g., Montgomery, 1993; Cooper, 1997; Isaac, 2002).

Overlapping with and extending beyond the independent elite militias of the Gilded era were a variety of other “corporate warriors”, hired guns for corporate use, usually in contention with labor. The self-organization of wealthy corporate elite increasingly gave way to state-organized garrison outposts in the form of the National Guard and their armories that dotted large industrial cities (Fogelson, 1989) and wage warriors hired by corporations to do various sorts of “security work.” Between the Gilded Age and World War II these two forms of domestic armament constituted a powerful armed force aimed primarily at the labor movement.

During the last quarter of the 19th century, business turned to the market to hire private armed forces. These consisted of various “mercenary contingency forces” (Isaac, 2002, p. 391) or what others have simply called “private police” (Johnson, 1976). One type of market-based armed force came in the form of corporate provision of hired guns, originally known as “detective agencies,” like the Pinkertons (Harrison, 1996), and their competitors (e.g., A. A. Anher, Baldwin-Felts, Bergoffs, Burns, Corporations Auxiliary Company, National Corporation Service, Railway Audit and Inspection Company, among many others). Business owners could contract with an agency to do a particular policing or undercover job, infiltrate a union, or break a strike. American labor history is, unfortunately, rich with such examples (Fusfeld, 1984; Norwood, 2002; Smith, 1993, 2003).

A second form of private policing was acquired through full-time wage workers on a company's payroll. Some companies maintained their own full-time police or army, sometimes called “merchant police.” Among the more infamous examples of this type of armed force were the “Coal & Iron Police” widespread in Pennsylvania (also known as the “Pennsylvania Cossacks”) (Norwood, 2002). Pennsylvania and other states, in effect, handed over policing powers to private company forces (Johnston, 1992, p. 20). The Ford Motor Company was also notorious for its company police squad (see Johnston, 1992, p. 19; Norwood, 2002, Chapter 5). The major distinction between these two forms was in the character of the armed agent's contract: In the first instance, a company would contract with another company (hire a detective agency like the Pinkertons) to do a particular job (e.g., break a strike, undermine a unionization drive); in the second form company forces would be maintained as full-time “security” employees of particular mining, railroad, or automobile companies.

These forms of private police specialized in providing armed guards, stockpiling weapons, breaking strikes, union-busting, propaganda services, and different aspects of industrial (class) espionage, including spies and agents provocateurs used against labor (Johnson, 1976; Fusfeld, 1984; Smith, 1993; Harrison, 1996). Federal troops and militias (both common and independent) played a heavy role in the repression of strikes and unemployed mobilizations between 1877 and the turn of the century (Hacker, 1969; Cooper, 1977; Adams, 1995), but such private police forces were widespread until the Second World War (Johnson, 1976). For example, in 1929 when union membership was 3.4 million, there were also about 200,000 labor spies at work (Johnson, 1976, p. 100). While likely overstated, “in 1936 a member of the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] estimated that American industrialists spent over $80,000,000 a year for espionage services” (Smith, 1993, p. 70). Between January 1934 and July 1936, General Motors alone spent almost one million dollars on undercover agents, employed 14 different anti-labor detective agencies, and had as many as 200 labor spies embedded in its plants (Smith, 1993, p. 70). Detective agencies not only infiltrated organized labor but also acquired leadership positions: “Of the 304 industrial spies employed by the Pinkerton Agency at the time of the LaFollette hearing [in 1937], nearly one-third held important union positions” (Smith, 1993, p. 72).5

The United States is said to have experienced the most contentious (Filipelli, 1990) and bloody (Taft & Ross, 1969) labor history of any industrialized nation. Whether it was actually at the very top of the heap is unclear; what we do know is that it was extremely violent. “Labor wars,” a term used by Sydney Lens (1973) to describe the violence that the early labor movement encountered, was no exaggeration. Between 1877 and the end of World War II, there were more than 240 strikes in which at least one person was killed and a total death count from strikes of at least 1,086 people (Lipold, 2003). Most of the fatalities were from the working-class (Wallace, 1970–71; Johnson, 1976, p. 96; Lipold, 2003). Corporate warriors, public and private, were responsible for much of this violent history and, as consequence, suppressed the development of free labor unions in the world's leading democracy. They also served as a prototype for private corporate armed security forces that would appear a century later.

The private military industry, comprised of more than 70 companies by 2002 (see Singer, 2003, Appendix I), is estimated to be over a $100 billion per year business (Keefe, 2004). PMFs have been deployed by a variety of clients, including the U.S. military on an increasing scale. Ken Silverstein's (2000) Private Warriors was the first major study to describe some aspects of the private military industry, “Mercenary, Inc.” (Chapter 4) in his terms. But in Corporate Warriors, P. W. Singer tells a more comprehensive story of the private military industry – what happens when the military, “the force that protects society” (Singer, 2003, p. 7) becomes deeply commodified. At the heart of the matter is the question of private corporations, many of which are made up of former government officials and ex-military personnel (and who owe their very success to this experience in public service), offering private military service for governments, and often at the public's expense.

PMFs are involved in “combat operations, strategic planning, military training, intelligence, military logistics, and information warfare” (Singer, 2003, p. 73). In the extreme, entire national militaries (e.g., Saudi Arabia) are managed and controlled by private companies. Although the industry was well established by the end of the 1990s, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent “war on terror” insure plenty of work (and profits) for these firms over the coming decades. Singer gives us an idea of the breadth and significance of the industry when he writes that, in the war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, private employees were “deployed with U.S. forces on the ground, maintained combat equipment, provided logistical support, and routinely flew on joint surveillance and targeting aircraft.” He also notes that “Hamid Karzai is protected by a DynCorp security force, made up of roughly forty ex-U.S. special forces troops,” and that the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which is housing enemy combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan was “built not by U.S. soldiers, but by Brown & Root for $45 million” (Singer, 2003, p. 17), and is serviced, in part, by Wachkenhut Corrections Corporation (White, 2004). PMFs are, in effect, an arm of U.S. foreign policy, “foreign policy by proxy,” as one defense expert put it (quoted in Silverstein, 2000, p. 145). The fact that private warrior firms can be used by the U.S. to pursue geopolitical interests without deploying U.S. military forces is especially convenient when it comes to training fighters in regimes with poor human rights records (Silverstein, 2000, p. 145).

Not just a product of Republican administrations, the industry grew during the Clinton Presidency.7 PMFs offer another way to get things done without the publicity, accountability, and political consequences that often accompany official military actions. The industry is attractive to firms because there is an enormous amount of money to be made, from top executives to contractors in the field. Firms generate profits by using “cost-plus” contracts. These funding formulas guarantee “profits for a firm even if costs escalate …” (Sennott, 2004, A1). Workers in the field can make upwards of $100,000 annually and often get paid generous overtime wages (Silver, 2003). They are also eligible to get “danger pay” that can range from 20 to 30 percent (Bredemeier, 2003) of their base pay. Cost-cutting and efficiency rationales are the usual explanations for reliance on private contractors (Wayne, 2002; Brooks, 2005). In 2002, Secretary of the Army, Thomas White claimed that “as much as a third of [the Army budget] was going on private contractors” (Leigh, 2004, p. 4).

Singer raises a number of questions about and provides a way to understand the role of contractors in the war in Iraq. The private military presence there is significant. PMF employees “operate communications systems, repair helicopters, fix weapons systems and link the computers with the troops to command centers” (Bredemeier, 2003, p. E1). In May 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld produced a list of “60 companies, half a dozen of them British” (Leigh, 2004, p. 4) then doing business in Iraq. In August 2004, it was estimated that there were 20,000 armed contractors in Iraq working with American forces, and another 10,000 working in a non-combatant capacity (Keefe, 2004), and the demand is growing for civilian warriors in war zones. Since the invasion of Iraq, the private military industry “has been on steroids,” according to Singer (quoted in Fidler, 2005, p. 2). The Iraqi Department of Interior claims about 50,000 contractors in Iraq as of spring 2005 (Levinsky, 2005). Blackwater Security recently estimated (early 2005) that “We will probably require at least 3000–4000 professionals above and beyond what we have in the Blackwater employment and resource system” (quoted in Townsend, 2005). As of this writing, somewhere between 240 and 300 military contractors (from a variety of nationalities) have died in Iraq (Levinsky, 2005; PBS-Frontline, 2005), approximately 15 percent of U.S. military casualties. More than a dozen contractors have been beheaded.

Civilian personnel have been employed as interrogators and translators during the Iraqi conflict and that PMF employees were involved in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. According to the Toronto Star: “Of the 37 interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison, 27 did not belong to the U.S. military but to a Virginia private contractor called CACI International. Twenty-two linguists who assisted them were employed by California-based Titan International” (Hurst, 2004, p. F3). The “Taguba Report,” which investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib, noted that “contractors in civilian clothes roamed freely in the prison, answering to no one, and [were] effectively outside the chain of command” (Keefe, 2004, p. 49).

The U.S. military command finds PMFs advantageous but their use has generated serious problems (Wayne, 2002) with the potential for much more damage. PMFs and their employees have been accused of not having the requisite integrity for combat operations, of overcharging clients, of corruption, and of war profiteering. Singer (2003) also criticizes PMFs for not being subject to the normal pressures of market competition, and also for contractors’ ambiguous legal status (Singer, 2004) that affords them immunity from virtually all forms of prosecution. Moreover, the need to protect corporate “proprietary information” makes the Freedom of Information Act largely useless (Silverstein, 2000, p. 145).

Some military spokespersons claim that there are sufficient review mechanisms in place to ensure that the military contractors are doing their jobs. For example, Major General Geoffrey D. Miller said the following of civilian interrogators: “They appear to me to doing work to standard … . If they do not follow our standards, then we discharge them. If there are acts that are beyond the level of discharge, then we will take appropriate action to hold them accountable” (Washburn & Bigelow, 2004, p. A1). Singer argues the opposite – that there is not nearly as much accountability and regulation of this industry as there should be. As he puts it, the private military field “has virtually no laws, oversight or any public understanding of how to deal with it” (quoted in Collier, 2004, p. A1).

Corporate Warriors presents itself as a more accurate description of the realities of global (in)security than one finds in much contemporary international relations theory. The main difference in the current situation, Singer tells us, is that it is no longer nation states and agents of governments that can legitimately exercise the use of force. Sociologist Max Weber, in his 1918,“Politics as a Vocation,” defined the modern state as an entity that “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1959[1918], p. 78, emphasis in original). Singer's big theoretical claim is that this is no longer the case. With the rise of PMFs, it is clear that Weber's claims that “force is a means specific to the state” and that “the state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence” (Weber, 1959[1918]) are simply no longer accurate. PMFs “deliver to consumers a wide spectrum of military services,” which were previously “generally assumed to be exclusively inside the public context” (Singer, 2003, p. 8).

However, Singer does seem to overstate the novelty of this claim. In the same passage from which the above quotations were drawn, Weber writes, “at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it” (Weber, 1959[1918], p. 78), that is to say that the state's imprimatur has been acquired. Here it seems that Weber is still partially correct, after all. For example, the U.S. government, as the leading client for these privatized military services, obviously knows (although its accounting seems quite poor (Price, 2005)) that these firms exist and it allows them to operate. Singer's larger point, of course, that today “the state's hold over violence is broken” (Singer, 2003, p. 18) is beyond dispute. In the past and, we would argue, today that privatization of force signals a serious weakness in the state itself.

The private military industry spans the globe and includes virtually every country concerned with security. Britain, Israel, South Africa, Russia, and the United States are some of the countries that are most involved in the field. The position and power of U.S. firms in particular is significant. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was protected in Iraq by guards from the Blackwater corporation, a leading U.S. firm.8 In terms of Singer's (2003, p. 93) “Tip of the Spear” typology, Blackwater (as well as DynCorp, another substantial and controversial U.S. firm) would be an example of what Singer calls a “military provider firm.” These entities “engage in actual fighting, either as line units or specialists” (Singer, 2003, p. 92). According to Blackwater's company website (blackwaterusa.com), the firm can “customize and execute solutions for our clients to help keep them at the level of readiness required to meet today's law enforcement, homeland security, and defense challenges.” Blackwater's clients include “federal law enforcement agencies, Department of Defense, Department of State, and Department of Transportation, local and state entities from around the country, multi-national corporations, and friendly nations from all over the globe” (blackwaterusa.com).

The second type of PMF Singer classifies as a “military consulting firm.” Such firms “provide advisory and training services” and “offer strategic, operational, and/or organizational analysis” (Singer, 2003, p. 95). A U.S. exemplar of this type is MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated), which was founded in 1987. MPRI's “employee pool draws from the highest levels of retired U.S. military personnel” (Singer, 2003, p. 119). Headquartered in Alexandria, VA, MPRI is active both domestically (e.g., in helping to “administer the ROTC and Staff College programs” (Singer, 2003, p. 121)) and globally. At the international level, MPRI offers clients “doctrinal development, re-structuring defense ministries, advanced war gaming, training on every types of weapons system, and military instruction down to squad-level tactics” (Singer, 2003, p. 142). The firm has been credited with “helping to alter the entire course of the war” in the Balkans (Singer, 2003, p. 123). More recently, MPRI has been awarded millions of dollars by the U.S. government to help in the fight against narco-terrorists and Marxist guerillas in Colombia.

Singer refers to the third type as the “military support firm.” Activities in this sector “include nonlethal aid and assistance, including logistics, intelligence, technical support, supply and transportation” (Singer, 2003, p. 97). Brown & Root Services (BRS, a subsidiary of Halliburton) is an example of a prominent firm of this type. Founded in 1919 as an “oil well cementing company” the Texas company “transformed the oil well construction and service industry” (Singer, 2003, p. 137) for the next half century. Halliburton gained exposure during the first Persian Gulf War in helping to “bring 320 burning oil wells under control” while BRS “was selected to assess and repair all the damaged public buildings in Kuwait” (Singer, 2003, p. 138). Headed by Dick Cheney in the 1990s, “a major boost to BRS came from the crisis in former Yugoslavia” (Singer, 2003, p. 143) where the company played numerous military logistics roles. It continues to be a major player in military operations in the post 9/11 environment.

One important characteristic of these firms is that many of them operate “virtual companies,” as Singer calls them. They “save by limiting their expenditure on fixed (‘brick and mortar’) assets” and “do not maintain large numbers of permanent employees [or] ‘standing forces.’” Instead, many PMFs rely on electronic “databases of qualified personnel and specialized subcontractors” (Singer, 2003, p. 75). This allows teams of contractors to be deployed very quickly and in a manner specifically crafted to the conflict at hand. Many corporate warriors, then, are contingent workers for the private military industry. Most PMF employees “have served at least some time in the public military” (Singer, 2003, p. 76). This affords PMFs a number of advantages: they have plenty of ex-military personnel to choose from; their new employees have already been trained and pre-screened; and their former military status can increase a firm's legitimacy in the military services market.

The purpose of Silverstein's study is primarily to demonstrate how various forms of private military interests rooted in the Cold War era have furthered their own interests and, as a result, preserved a Cold War military culture long after the Cold War has ended. One of those many forms is the private “Mercenary, Inc.” industry. While he does not attempt a systematic theorization of this phenomenon, he does make a claim about the central driving force. The chief factor pushing the expansion of corporate mercenary firms, according to Silverstein (2000, p. 144), has been the cutbacks in U.S. armed forces personnel since the end of the Cold War. So the post-Cold War “peace dividend” has found its way into the bottom lines of PMFs.

Like Silverstein, much of Singer's book is also descriptive. But one chapter in Corporate Warriors is devoted to explaining the rise of recent security privatization. The argument has three main dimensions and hinges on: (1) security problems accompanying the end of the Cold War; (2) changes in the nature of warfare; (3) the pressures of privatization.

Singer recognizes state strength (or lack thereof) as an element in the rise of the new private armed force industry. However, his recognition congers up images of “enfeebled,” small Third World states, not that of Empire. This may be, in part, the result of his breadth of coverage rather than in-depth historical analysis of the relevant U.S. history. Singer misses the significance of state strength/weakness and, thereby, weakens his own explanation for the recent significant reliance on private armed force by the United States. The current weakness of the U.S. state is, at root, a limitation of military-enforced Empire; its abstract roots are in Cold War containment policy, manifested concretely in Vietnam.

Private armed force was a central part of the capitalist countermovement to suppress the labor movement in America between 1877 and the Second World War. This early capital–labor history indicates how capital, when faced with constraints of a weak state, improvised to create its own local (flexible) armed force. This was particularly relevant during a period when the labor movement was being framed as “outlaw” and even terrorist in character. Private purchase of armed force was relied upon when public mobilization through state institutions was insufficient to provide the “security” that private businesses desired. These private armed forces served as a form of local quasi-state: they were typically sanctioned, often informally, by existing state officials (e.g., municipalities or governors) and functioned as an extension of the state apparatus. But the building of these local quasi-state forms had a powerful class character for two important reasons: they targeted and sought to undermine the labor movement and as these private armed forces came to be selectively sanctioned by state officials, ethnic-based and/or workers’ militias that were unexceptional prior to the early 1880s became increasingly repressed out of existence.

What is the significance of these observations? It was not only in early European state formation (that Singer points to) that irregular, private armed force played a significant role in the character and making of state power, it was central in 19th and early 20th-century U.S. experience, too. Importantly, this early experience trained both private and public (army) armed forces on elite concerns with domestic “order.” What this suggests is that if the threat is sufficient and private resources are available, private mobilization of armed force will emerge to “patch” (Skowronek, 1982) or fill the vacuum in public state provision. In the current period, private armed forces are being relied upon, in part, by the U.S. military because of constraints on the state's ability to mobilize military forces at sufficient troop strength levels.

In other words, the U.S. is faced with drawing on private warriors because it lacks a sufficient supply of public “citizen soldiers” (“regulars”) to handle self-imposed fighting obligations, especially in Iraq. Singer builds supply and demand of military forces into his explanation, but he fails to link these concerns to conditions of state strength, especially in the form of political–cultural constraints. In short, the U.S. has been and still is constrained, and in some sense weakened, by the misadventure in Vietnam, and the related abolition of the draft. As Roxborough (2003, p. 348)claims: “Any assessment of the modern American military must start with Vietnam”. Yet Singer never even mentions Vietnam.

An important dimension of the meaning of state strength rests with state capacity to mobilize against external threats to its territorial integrity and to its citizenry. A strong state demonstrates its military capacity through its pre-existing legitimacy and the legitimacy of its campaigns, and mobilizes the military forces it needs either through conscription and volunteers or through a combination of the two. Before the Vietnam War was ever over, conscription ended as a vehicle for mobilizing U.S. armed forces personnel. With the extraction of U.S. troops by 1973 and the collapse of Saigon by 1975, Vietnam became the major constraint on the military branch of the U.S. state apparatus. The legacy of Vietnam was not only a constraint on the military, but also a constraint on politicians seeking to mobilize extensive military forces for less than direct threats. Those that lamented this constraint most keenly gave it a name, “the Vietnam Syndrome,” which stated simply is “the American public's disinclination to engage in further military interventions in internal Third World conflicts” (Klare, 1982, p. 1). This is, of course, especially the case if such interventions were of sufficient magnitude to require conscription to fill manpower obligations.

The “Vietnam Syndrome” shaped the politics of the U.S. military. For many military leaders the big lesson of Vietnam was to never again get into a situation where the nation cannot be fully mobilized behind a declared war and all-out, high-intensity fighting. Once national support was realized, it would also be absolutely necessary to have clear goals and clear exit strategy. “No more Vietnams” meant no more low-intensity quagmires with unclear goals (Roxborough, 2003). It also meant the avoidance of a draft and reliance on an all-volunteer military to minimize over-politicization of military ventures.11

Even before the Iraq quagmire, the U.S. was having difficulty sustaining the all-volunteer force. In fact, a group of military experts met for a symposium in the summer prior to 9/11 to discuss changing citizenship, military service, and problems with the all-volunteer force (Abrams & Bacevich, 2001; Burk, 2001; Moskos, 2001; Cohen, 2001; Morgan, 2001). One of the major points of consensus from this group was that the sixties cultural revolution and the Vietnam War changed the relationship between citizen and state – “the federal government has effectively forfeited its ability to compel citizens to serve in the military. Conscription has become and will remain implausible” (Abrams & Bacevich, 2001, pp. 19–20).

Prior to 9/11 and the expanded “war on terror” that moved into Iraq, some observers were already calling the Army's manpower levels and recruitment difficulties “desperate” (Morgan, 2001). Military sociologist Charles Moskos (1999, p. A19) stated that “no problem is more serious in an armed forces than recruitment shortfalls.” Now deep into the Iraq campaign, the manpower problem has been seriously exacerbated. Signs of the times in the first quarter of 2005 include: (1) the Army, Army Reserves, and National Guard have missed monthly recruitment targets for several months in a row;12 (2) recruiters are under extraordinary pressure to produce new bodies, with all sorts of physical, psychological fallout, including illegal exit; since October 2002, 37 members of the Army Recruiting Command have gone AWOL (Cave, 2005a); (3) standards for recruitment have been lowered and while the cost of each successful recruit increases (Herbert, 2005); (4) combat rotations are longer, while promises to new recruits are for shorter tours (Herbert, 2005); (5) the Reserve is over-deployed; and (6) some military analysts like Michelle Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded recently that U.S. policy is currently in the process of “breaking the army” (also see Krugman, 2005; Clarke, 2005).

Many authorities have worried about the disconnect, the civilian–military gap (Morgan, 2001). This military–civilian cultural gap is manifested in a variety of different ways, but most significantly in growing difficulties with recruitment and retention even before the problems created by the Iraq War. For instance, during the mid-1990s, the number of junior officers who left the military after one term of duty increased 50 percent; and surveys of young people indicate that the number of those saying that they “definitely will not serve in the military” is going up, from 40 percent in 1980 to 63 percent in 1999 (Moskos, 2001, pp. 39–40). This is not just a youthful opposition to military service either. It has been growing among parents too.13

This “disconnect” is the manifestation of the limits of Empire coming home to roost. Empire involves much more than just global military strategy and foreign policy. It carries with it accumulated culture – images, symbols, stories, heroes, villains, fools – all legacies of earlier military adventures and with an all-volunteer force we are finding a political, cultural, and psychological divide, a lack of identification of young people with the military. Kaplan (2003, p. 56) puts it this way:An empire is defined not only by its foreign policy, but also by the style and psychology of its military. The military expert Eliot Cohen notes that a mass conscription army of citizen soldiers are people who fight in a war in which you can make a distinct separation between good and evil, as in World War I and World War II, in which soldiers fought, for example, to make the world safe for democracy or to eliminate fascism and Japanese militarism. He defined an imperial soldiery, who likes the soldiering life for its own sake … . This is their job, and they enjoy it. They are always looking forward to the next mission, and they find themselves increasingly separated psychologically from civilian American society.

It is not only that “the cause” is different now (Empire requires a different kind of military outlook), but fighting for a cause in which elites do not spill the blood of their young becomes less and less acceptable for everyone else. As Charles Moskos (2001, p. 46) put it: “The advent of the all-volunteer force in 1973 [generated by Vietnam] ensured that the children of our national elites would not be found in the military, especially in the enlisted ranks.” “In the case of the true citizen-soldier, military service is either an obligation imposed by the state or the result of mobilization for some pressing cause” (Cohen, 2001, pp. 23–24). Currently in Iraq, we have neither. Therefore, we have a lower tolerance for combat casualties due to the cause and expectations about who should fight for it. Class inequality in combat casualties is always bad for a democracy, so much more so when it is in the service of Empire.

The post-September 11th “global war on terrorism” has, because of the way it has been constructed politically, brought the U.S. military back to those very conditions that in the post-Vietnam era it had sought to avoid: vague and ill-defined goals, lack of exit-strategies, and the need for low-intensity counter-insurgency war-fighting. With direct attacks on the U.S., like the 9/11 assaults, the U.S. has no difficulty ramping up support at home or abroad. But incursions like the current war in Iraq (unlike the previous Gulf War) with its chief characteristics – long duration, low-intensity, unclear goals, and lack of exit strategy, nation reconstruction, and growing body counts – are a different story.

Our central point is this: A major pressure on the U.S. military to move to private armed forces in the current period is due to state weakness, its inability to mobilize sufficient fighting forces for the Iraq campaign, and ostensibly other engagements, through the regular public military. The global war on terror as launched by the U.S. government and the Bush administration in particular has an important path-dependent quality – what we as a nation can and cannot do today is, at least in part, shaped by what we as a nation did yesterday – has been ignored in the major accounts of the rise of the corporate warrior industry. The war on terror, with its immense and amorphous global implications, in the shadow of the Vietnam Syndrome has put serious limits on what the U.S. military has been able to do in terms of manpower obligations. Numerous experts, including high-ranking military officers, have pointed to the insufficient troop strength in Iraq.14 This insufficiency is manifested in heavy reliance on National Guard and reserve units, their extended stays, and the feeble “coalition of the willing” international forces. A significant part of the demand pressure for private warriors is due to echoes of Vietnam, as the denouement of Cold War containment militarism's long legacy continues to shape the current supply of volunteers for the “war on terror” through regular military service. This is the central condition that operates as constraint because the state is unwilling and/or unable to build sufficient troop strength through a combination of conscription and volunteers for wars like the one in Iraq.

These circumstances have generated considerable debate among military experts, some of which has appeared in the mass media, about what might be done to bolster U.S. troop levels. But most of these debated approaches – e.g., slick advertising, removal of recruitment competition among military branches, linking military service to basic citizenship rights (Cave, 2005b) – are not likely to be sufficient under current conditions. Instead, the U.S. will be faced with more of the same: (1) an inadequate level of volunteers through the regular military, to be supplemented by, (2) private warriors from military contractor firms, and (3) the “sepoy strategy.” Sepoy is a traditional imperial approach to training “native” soldiers to do the brunt of the military work (Johnson, 2004, pp. 134–135), used by earlier empires (e.g., British), by the U.S. in Vietnam, and is currently underway in Iraq. The private warrior approach has certainly been stimulated by relatively recent events (e.g., Vietnam Syndrome, privatization revolution), but its organizational template was cast over a century ago in the form of the corporate security services (read: union-busting) industry. Both forms of private irregular armed force signal symptoms of state weakness.